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10 Most Requested Speakers on Innovation

Innovation is the catalyst for growth, profit, and sustainability for any business so it is no wonder that it is one of the most requested speaking topics from just about every industry.

Here are our highest rated Speakers on Innovation:

Updated March 2024

Mick Ebeling | Founder and CEO of Not Impossible Labs, Top 50 World’s Most Creative People, Speaker on Innovation

Named by Fortune Magazine as one of the Top 50 World’s Greatest Leaders, a recipient of the Muhammad Ali Humanitarian of the Year Award and listed as one of the world’s most influential creative people by The Creativity 50’s, Mick Ebeling is a maker, hacker and inventor who has sparked a movement of pragmatic, inspirational innovation. As a career producer and filmmaker and now founder and CEO of Not Impossible, Ebeling consistently speaks to companies and audiences all over the world inspiring them to change their world, and the world.

Ebeling founded Not Impossible, a multiple award-winning social innovation lab and production company, on the premise that nothing is impossible. His mantra of “Commit, Then Figure it out” allows him to convene a brilliant teams of hackers, doers, makers and thinkers to create inventions and creations that better the world by bringing accessibility for all.

Called the “Elon Musk of Good,” Ebeling is only person to ever be honored 2x as a TIME Magazine Top Invention of the Year recipient, a 2x Tribeca Disruptor innovation winner, a 2x SXSW innovation of the year award winner, as a WIRED Agent of Change, a fellow with The Nantucket Project, and a recipient of every major creative and advertising award, Ebeling is on a mission to change the world by creating “Technology for the Sake of Humanity.”

More about Mick: https://thesweeneyagency.com/speakers/mick-ebeling/

Terence Mauri | Innovation & Disruptive Leadership Speaker

Leaders from Alibaba, HSBC and Facebook choose Terence to ignite Mindset 2.0 – a disruption mindset to break the rules and reimagine your business today.

Terence Mauri is the Founder of global think tank Hack Future Lab and is a Partner with MIT Solve, an initiative to address world challenges. He brings decades of experience and knowledge sharing cutting edge principles on the future of leadership beyond disruption. He is a Bestselling Author and his new book The 3D Leader: Take Your Leadership to the Next Dimension is an actionable and robust guide for ALL people to realize that a new dimension in personal leadership is at the core of creating opportunity. The 3D Leader is for  every person who wants to learn three winning mindsets – THINK BOLD, CHOOSE BRAVE, GO BEYOND – that will equip you with a practical set of actions for you to completely reimagine how you lead. 

Terence’s Inc. column Future Proof  has over 1M views per month, and his thinking on how to find your next cutting edge has been published in The Economist, Forbes, Reuters, HuffPost and Wired and he has delivered keynotes around the world for clients including Visa, Facebook, VMware, Capital One and HSBC, as well as fast-growing start-ups. Terence holds Entrepreneur Mentor in Residence roles at MIT and London Business School and has over 20 years experience of helping leaders bounce back from adversity and move beyond disruption. He has also been ranked by Thinkers50 as one of the top 30 management thinkers in the world. 

More about Terence: https://thesweeneyagency.com/speakers/terence-mauri/

Erica Dhawan | Leading Authority on Collaboration and Innovation

When leaders want to break team silos, drive exponential growth and innovate through teamwork, they call Erica Dhawan.

Erica Dhawan is an internationally recognized leading authority, speaker and advisor on 21st century teamwork, collaboration and innovation. Named as one of the top 50 management thinkers in the world by Thinkers50, she is the author of two bestselling books, Get Big Things Done: The Power of Connectional Intelligence and Digital Body Language: How to Build Trust and Connection, No Matter the Distance.

As we continue to experience an increasingly digital world where work practices are changing at a blistering pace, Erica shares innovative strategies to unlock the collective power of teams, build a culture of trust across any distance and create authentic engagement to ensure competitiveness. Rated #1 on the Top Women Keynote Speakers list, Erica frequently appears in the Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, and The Wall Street Journal.

More about Erica: https://thesweeneyagency.com/speakers/erica-dhawan/

Rohit Bhargava | Expert on Marketing, Branding, Trends & Disruption, Innovation, Storytelling

Rohit Bhargava is an innovation and marketing expert, skilled facilitator, and keynote speaker. After a successful 15-year career as a brand and marketing strategist at two of the largest agencies in the world (Ogilvy and Leo Burnett) – Rohit became an entrepreneur and has since started three companies. He is the 3-time Wall Street Journal bestselling author of nine books on topics as wide-ranging as the future of business, building a brand with personality, and how to create a more diverse and inclusive world and has delivered sold out keynote presentations and workshops to business leaders in 32 countries.

As a keynote speaker, Rohit has been invited to share his insights at some of the most forward-looking organizations and stages in the world including Intel, NASA, Disney, JP Morgan Chase, LinkedIn, Microsoft, American Express, CES, SXSW, the World Bank, Coca-Cola and hundreds of others. At SXSW in particular, the long lines outside his popular Featured Session talks have wrapped around the entire Austin Convention Center and down the stairs to the lower level. After his packed session one year, an attendee tweeted after his talk that “he’s no Beyonce, but definitely worth standing in line for.” It’s one of Rohit’s favorite after-talk endorsements. He is indeed no Beyonce, but his sessions are still pretty darn entertaining.

More about Rohit: https://thesweeneyagency.com/speakers/rohit-bhargava/

Lisa Bodell | Global Leader on Simplification & Banishing Complexity, Innovation, Leadership, Change, Collaboration, and Transforming Culture

“Complexity is crippling our organizations. It’s stifling our people and keeping them from doing their most meaningful and impactful work.” Lisa Bodell, a global leader on simplification, collaboration, and innovation, has a solution. Lisa shows organizations how to eliminate complexity and leverage simplicity – unleashing creativity and sparking the energy so essential to innovate and compete in a rapidly changing world. FutureThink, which she founded in 2003, works with leading brands worldwide and has become the largest source of innovation research, tools, and training in the world. Lisa is the author of two groundbreaking books, Why Simple Wins: Escape the Complexity Trap and Get to Work That Matters and Kill the Company: End the Status Quo, Start an Innovation Revolution. She ranks on the list of Top 50 Speakers Worldwide and captivates audiences with her energy and humor. Lisa’s keynotes leave audiences inspired to change and arms them with radically simple tools to get to the work that matters.

After earning her business degree from University of Michigan, Lisa launched her career at Leo Burnett in Chicago, where she discovered a gift for uniting strategically-driven ideas with forward-thinking themes. She went on to build two successful businesses before moving to New York and focusing on the simplification and innovation space with FutureThink.

More about Lisa: https://thesweeneyagency.com/speakers/lisa-bodell/

Duncan Wardle | Former Walt Disney Executive & Speaker on Innovation and Creativity

Duncan Wardle maintains that “we are all born creative – we are born with amazing imaginations, are full of curiosity, and carry this remarkable built-in tool known as intuition.” Duncan spent 25+ years in leadership roles at Disney – where, when he was Head of Innovation and Creativity, he led the team that helped Imagineering, Lucasfilm, Marvel, Pixar and Disney Parks to innovate, creating magical new storylines and experiences for consumers around the globe. As founder of iD8 & innov8 he now brings his extensive Disney experience delivering keynotes, workshops and ideation forums, around the globe helping companies strategize and embed a culture of innovation into everyone’s DNA.

Duncan’s talks are anything but ordinary. Sharing real world stories and lessons learned from the innovation battlefield, Duncan leaves audiences inspired, motivated, and ready to innovate for their own organizations.

On a mission to eradicate the status quo – Duncan challenges everyone to claim their own creativity, thus creating a culture of innovation never possible before. Duncan is now one of the world’s most highly regarded innovation speakers and consultants, teaching companies, brands and individuals across the globe to overcome their own expertise and get out of their own way. To think differently and creatively.

More about Duncan: https://thesweeneyagency.com/speakers/duncan-wardle/

Angela Oguntala | Global Authority on Foresight and Innovation

Named a Future Innovator by the United Nations, Angela Oguntala is a futurist and global authority on foresight and innovation.

She is a founding partner at Greyspace, a foresight consultancy. Across the globe, she helps organizations understand and innovate for a world in transition. Her clients have included IKEA, Hermès, Philips, Sky, Deloitte, The World Economic Forum, The World Trade Organization, Microsoft, Bayer and Swiss Life.

Over the past decade, Angela has been asked to speak on a wide range of future-facing topics. She has delivered hundreds of keynotes worldwide on themes including: innovating through uncertainty, emerging technology impacts, purpose driven innovation, leadership & organizational foresight, creativity, sustainability, as well as on specific domains from the future of work to futures of healthcare.

More about Angela: https://thesweeneyagency.com/speakers/angela-oguntala/

Chris Barton | Founder and Creator of Shazam, Entrepreneur, Inventor, and Tech Investor

Spend time with inventor Chris Barton and you’ll be inspired to believe anything is possible. His positive energy to make seemingly impossible ideas come to life is absolutely contagious. Chris’s latest venture, Guard, uses AI to detect drowning in swimming pools – a never-before accomplished effort. Chris’s best-known creation is Shazam, the app that changed the way the world discovers music and laid the groundwork for the consumer AI industry we know today. With over 2 billion downloads, Shazam is a global phenomenon and Apple’s sixth-largest acquisition. The app lets people identify songs out of thin air from anywhere they are, making it nothing short of pure magic. Chris holds 12 patents and played key roles in the early days of Google and Dropbox. He believes his dyslexia helps him uncover novel solutions to obstacles and to achieving audacious goals. In his speeches, Chris shares his Start From Zero thinking method of questioning assumptions and challenging conventional wisdom. His amazing story and storytelling completely captivate audiences and inspires them to make big things happen in their organizations – to create magic in defiance of the obstacles.

Holding 12 patents, including one found within the Google search algorithm that billions of people use, Chris has made significant contributions to the tech industry. He also invests in a wide range of start-ups, including artificial intelligence for heart health and inflammatory disease therapeutics.

Today, Chris spends much of his time building his third startup company, Guard, a system that detects drowning in swimming pools using artificial intelligence.

More about Chris: https://thesweeneyagency.com/speakers/chris-barton/

Kaihan Krippendorff | Strategy and Innovation Expert & Founder of Outthinker

Kaihan Krippendorff is the CEO of Outthinker Networks, a global think-tank of chief strategy and innovation executives shaping the future of business. A sought-after keynote speaker, Kaihan is recognized by Global Gurus and Thinkers50 as one of the top 30 global thinkers in strategy and innovation. His work helps organizations generate breakthrough ideas that drive transformation and growth in our accelerated world of change.

Leveraging skills and experience from McKinsey and Company with rigorous research of emerging trends, Kaihan designs practical business tools that he delivers through engaging and hands-on experiences. He is an innovation catalyst to business leaders and CXOs of some of the world’s most admired companies. To date, his work has generated over $2.5B in new annual revenue for clients that include Aetna-CVS, JP Morgan, Lockheed Martin, Procter & Gamble, IBM, and Yahoo.

A prolific writer, Kaihan has published five books including the bestsellers Outthink the Competition and Driving Innovation from Within. Amidst a dizzying schedule of keynotes, workshops, ongoing research, and writing, Kaihan still finds time to teach for Wharton Executive Education, Florida International University, and New York University; host the Outthinkers podcast; and play an active role on two corporate advisory boards.

More about Kaihan: https://thesweeneyagency.com/speakers/Kaihan-Krippendorff

Nancy Giordano | Futurist, Corporate Strategist & Speaker

Described as endlessly optimistic, Nancy Giordano is a strategic futurist and bestselling author with a drive to help enterprise organizations and visionary leaders transform to meet the escalating expectations ahead. Recognized as one of the world’s top female futurists, she has spent her career building, shaping and evolving a portfolio of $60+ billion worth of major global brands.  With growing conviction of what will (and needs to) shift, executives value her unique abilities to sense and synthesize the terrain ahead and guide those ready to build more relevant and sustainable solutions.

With a career at three of the top global advertising agencies and as founder of her own strategic inspiration company, Play Big Inc, Nancy has a rich history of advising and learning with some of the top companies in the world, including Nestle, Brinker International, The Coca Cola Company, Sprint and Acumen. In 2015 she took a leap to help shape a company of the future: artificial intelligence start-up, Lucid and later went on to build a leadership summit designed to encourage c-suite executives to explore seven of the most disruptive emergent technologies for business. Two years ago, Nancy joined Austin-based artificial intelligence services company, Kungfu.AI, to help visionary enterprise leaders better understand and harness the transformative effects of AI applications. She is also championing the work of Riane Eisler to create a movement around Partnerism, a socio-economic system that is built on partnership versus the domination models of Capitalism and Socialism.

More about Nancy: https://thesweeneyagency.com/speakers/nancy-giordano/

Diana Kander | Entrepreneur, Author, and Speaker on Innovation

Diana Kander revolutionizes the way businesses look at innovation and curiosity. A New York Times best-selling author, innovation consultant and keynote speaker, she asks some big questions. What kind of culture needs to exist in an organization to ensure innovative ideas and practices? How has Snoop Dogg continued to innovate decade after decade to stay relevant to the next generation? What causes name brands to lose relevance with their customers and go out of business? Can organizational decline be prevented?

Diana has spent her career challenging assumptions and asking thought-provoking questions. A serial entrepreneur who entered the United States as a refugee at the age of 8, she has launched and sold millions of dollars worth of products and services. She outlined her biggest lessons learned for launching new products in her first book, All In Startup, which has been used by over 100 universities in their innovation courses and countless large organizations to help their employees think more like entrepreneurs. A former MBA professor at Mizzou, she has served as an entrepreneur in residence at H&R Block, Commerce Bank and several government agencies.

Diana’s second book, The Curiosity Muscle explains why it’s harder to stay at the top than it was to get there. The book documents Diana’s consulting experience with large organizations and demonstrates why most companies who experience significant success can so easily get comfortable, lose their curiosity and crash into irrelevance. The book walks readers through a methodology to keep curiosity alive and thriving inside of an organization, ultimately, future-proofing the business.

More about Diana: https://thesweeneyagency.com/speakers/diana-kander/

Mike Walsh | Speaker on the Change, Technology and Innovation

Mike Walsh is the CEO of Tomorrow, a global consultancy on designing companies for the 21st century. A global nomad, futurist and author of the best-selling book, The Algorithmic Leader, he advises some of the world’s biggest organizations on digital transformation and disruptive innovation in this new era of machine intelligence.

A prolific writer and commentator, Mike’s views have appeared in a wide range of international publications including Harvard Business Review, Inc. Magazine, BusinessWeek, Forbes and the Wall Street Journal. Each week he interviews provocative thinkers, innovators and troublemakers on his podcast, ‘Between Worlds‘.

His latest book, The Algorithmic Leader: How to be smart when machines are smarter than you, offers a hopeful and practical guide for reinventing leadership and organizations. By applying Walsh’s 10 core principles, readers will be able to design their own journey of personal transformation, harness the power of algorithms, and chart a clear path ahead–for their company, their team, and themselves.  Mike is also the author of  The Dictionary Of Dangerous Ideas, a collection of the most challenging concepts facing business leaders at the dawn of the 21st century. At the intersection of emerging technologies and new patterns of human behavior, the ideas in the Dictionary have been chosen for both their potential to transform the way companies operate, and inspire new forms of thinking.

More about Mike: https://thesweeneyagency.com/speakers/mike-walsh/

To Learn more about these speakers contact [email protected]

Derek Sweeney is the Director of Speaker Ideas at The Sweeney Agency. www.thesweeneyagency.com. For 15 years Derek has been helping clients find the right Speakers for their events. Derek can be reached at 1-866-727-7555 or [email protected]